Did You Really Shoot the Television? (24 page)

His big mistake, entirely in character, was a failure to do any botanical homework before surrendering himself to the hazards of Ressource. Had he but known it, for instance, palm ‘salad’ – the greenery at the growing heart of the tree – offered an important source of vitamins. All manner of nutrients could be extracted from available fish and vegetation. But Mac had fallen in love with a fantasy of himself as castaway, shooting and fishing for survival with the insouciance of an English gentleman, the dash of a Hollywood white
hunter thrust amid savages. The notion that some boring biological knowledge might be useful, indeed indispensable, to his welfare was alien to him. Most of the Hastingses have been ignorant of science. An unkind critic might have said that Mac’s decision to land on Ressource, then make up the story as he went along, represented no lesser hubris than a similarly casual commitment to turn up at the Royal Opera House and attempt to dance
Swan Lake
. Mac cherished a romantic delusion that any man who could pull down a pheasant, skin a buck and cast a good line on the Spey was equipped for survival on an atoll in the Indian Ocean. This view was now confounded.

It was fortunate that whimsy had not prompted him to compose his essay in survival on the Polar icecap, for instance, where such careless braggadocio would have killed him. The Indian Ocean was more forgiving: not much so, but sufficiently to enable him to live to tell the tale. He set about constructing a shelter, some ten feet by twenty. At the end of the first day, he perceived that his clumsiness with axe and mattock was making heavy labour of a task that would have taken a Seychellois a quarter of the time. In the soft sand, it proved hard to sink parallel headposts and keep them upright. With infinite sluggishness, a framework of poles rose amid the trees, roughly knotted with palm strands, then thatched with palm fronds.

He had done nothing, before embarking, to make himself fit. Indeed, until the moment he stepped ashore he sustained his lifelong regime of fifty cigarettes and the best part of a bottle of gin a day. For years he had taken no more physical exercise than was required to walk to a pub, a riverbank or a shooting peg. In the unremitting heat of Ressource, he discovered that each day he could manage only two hours of manual labour, after which he sank down exhausted. Far from missing books or amusements, he found himself falling asleep as he scribbled his journal each night.

By the end of the first week, hunger had begun to gnaw at him. The island’s modest supply of wild chicken eggs soon expired. Mac thrashed Friday when he caught the dog wolfing eggs wholesale. This was not only unjust, but futile. It was too late to preserve any stock. Thereafter, the diet of dog and man alike consisted of fish, oysters,
and a prodigious quantity of coconuts. Fortunately many trees had been bent almost horizontal by the wind, and thus required no exertion to harvest. Salt was not a problem, for it was easily dried from seawater. Mac lit fires by focusing a camera lens on driftwood under the sun. He found a pleasant-smelling herb to flavour each night’s stew. But bulk and vitamins were lacking. He was garnering only sufficient food to provide coconuts for breakfast, together with a cooked meal at night. Remarkably soon, even a man as careless of his own health as was Mac began to notice the pleadings of his stomach. Ben Gunn in
Treasure Island
became obsessed with thoughts of toasted cheese. Mac hankered for sardines – and soon, indeed, for any substantial fare at all.

On the seventh day, he was momentarily careless as he slashed at a palm frond with his panga. The blade buried itself in his right thumb. It was three days before he discovered that, by mistake, the pirogue crew had landed among his luggage a box of medical supplies intended for Darros. He was then able to bind his finger with plaster, but it ached fiercely. To compound his troubles, as he contemplated his almost completed house, the structure groaned, tottered, then crashed in ruin. For the first time he experienced real anguish, even despair. There was nothing to be done, save start the whole construction over again. A rainstorm pelted down on his waterlogged encampment, causing his hair to hang in rats’ tails, Friday’s body to steam.

He found that, more even than nails, he lamented a lack of containers capable of holding liquids and food. He scoured the flotsam on the shoreline for cans and boxes. It was a red-letter day when he found a glass buoy with a stopper, such as Japanese deep-sea fishermen used on their nets. He found three bottles, and amused himself by casting them back into the sea with appropriate messages, though none was ever returned to him. Having only a knife with which to eat, he was troubled by lack of a spoon. He tried in vain to carve a suitable wooden substitute, and resorted instead to shells. To his surprise, he discovered that the gun, which he had supposed would be indispensable to a castaway, was redundant. Edible birds were easily caught. He killed stingrays in the shallows with a spear.
Mac the hunter unexpectedly found himself feeling that it would anyway be sacrilegious to break the spell of the island’s silence with the detonation of firearms. His beloved 12-bore lingered in its case, unfired from the first day on the island to the last.

When Friday ate his leather belt, Mac fashioned a replacement from a stingray tail. He found seaweed an acceptable substitute for toilet paper, but his own filthiness increasingly irked him. However often he washed himself and his shorts in the ocean, his body itched, even in the absence of biting insects. A man who had always disliked facial hair on others, he became increasingly bothered by his beard, and picked at it irritably. Confronted by necessity, he hardened his heart to cruelty. Meat could not be preserved dead for even a few hours, so he kept it alive. He caught wild chickens at dusk as they fluttered up to roost, then kept them trussed by his fireside until next day. He began to yearn for a woman – not, I think, for sexual purposes, but simply to feed him. Mac was no twenty-first-century domesticated man, indeed he was barely a twentieth-century one.

Friday, oddly enough, flourished on the island routine. The dog, to which Mac became devoted, bounded hither and thither with irrepressible energy, plentifully fed on local birdlife. Fifi the tortoise, by contrast, was a social disappointment. From the day they arrived on the island until that on which they left, she scarcely moved. A tap on the shell caused her cautiously to project her head; a second tap induced her to withdraw it again. From an early stage, Fifi displayed absolute lack of interest in Mac’s great experiment in wilderness survival. Disgusted by her inertia, he observed crossly that it was not surprising giant tortoises live for two hundred years, given how little they exert themselves. Afterwards, he decided that he should have eaten Fifi.

Mac himself, at a disturbingly early stage, began to fall prey to a lassitude attributable to lack of nourishment. ‘It’s probably the usual reaction when you go to the sea for a summer holiday,’ he wrote in his journal on the tenth day. ‘At first, you’re bubbling with enthusiasm; swimming twice a day, going for long walks, planning picnics and motor-coach rides, and walking along the promenade to see the
illuminations. But, after a week, you’re quite content to hire a deckchair on the pier and listen to the band. I’m in the deckchair mood.’

There was a middle period in his sojourn on the island, around the third week, when for a time he experienced remarkable contentment. He felt that the absence of gin and cigarettes was doing him good. A near-alcoholic at home, he was pleased to notice that, for the first time in years, his hands had ceased to shake. His emergency brandy bottle remained untouched. He yearned for a handkerchief; a shave; soap; boiled silverside of beef with carrots, dumplings, jacket potato; and, so he claimed, a woman’s voice.

Mac’s own narrative of the desert island experience is sorely incomplete, because it records much about what he did, little about what he thought. He must have spent many hours contemplating his arid relationship with Anne and his own unhappiness. Even in after years, however, he admitted to no such reflections. Proper Englishmen in that inhibited, pre-Diana era supposed it indecent to give vent to emotion, even in the privacy of a journal. Both Mac and Anne lacked self-knowledge, but there must have been moments on that ridiculous island when the castaway asked himself whether such an expedition represented a proportionate or even sane response to an unhappy marriage.

During his happy days in the third week, he completed construction of a table, which he could now use to write his journal, seated on an old crate. His new house was much more successful than the first one. Finding a plank on the shoreline with three nails embedded, he wrote on it in neat charcoal ‘MR. MACDONALD HASTINGS’ and fixed the sign proudly to a tree outside the hut. He began to weave a bed to enable him to sleep off the ground, completing this on the twenty-first day. He found himself untroubled by the absence of either books or company. But the tyranny of food, the need to provide it and the misery of being without it, became a mounting obsession: ‘Every day that passes my heart goes out to the ordinary housewife. How women can go on feeding men every day for a lifetime is beyond me. I work on my house with patience, because I can see a result, the end of the task. But within a few minutes of providing
a meal there’s nothing to show for it, nothing to look forward to except repeating the performance over again.’

On the evening of his twenty-second day, as he prepared to eat boiled white fish, he experienced a wave of nausea. The doctor on Mahe had warned him to expect this. It was a first sign that his stomach was commencing a revolt prompted by deprivation and lack of vitamins. He found two tins of corned beef among the medical kit. Hacking one open with his knife, he found the contents dissolved into a stinking goo. When he tried to eat a little, he threw up. Friday finished the beef, of course. Mac went to bed hungry. Later, he was told by doctors that if he, like the dog, had eaten fish raw rather than cooked, his health might have deteriorated much less swiftly.

Afterwards, he claimed to have been ashamed of how little useful work he did during his later weeks on the island. Once the hut was complete, he spent hours collecting cowry shells exquisitely polished by the elements. He pottered in the shallow water, peering fascinated upon the riches of the reef: ‘Turning over the coral, iridescent in paintbox colours, is like turning over the contents of a colossal junkshop in which, every now and again, your eyes light upon a little masterpiece. The lagoon is a patchwork of glittering greens, the shades determined by the character of the marine landscape below – a landscape peopled with fantastic creatures: tiny squids, hermit-crabs, silver sea-snakes, green and red anemones, myriads of small fish, winkles, crabs and limpets – often in water so thin that it doesn’t cover their backs – rays, sharks, and shoals of big mullet.’

His mind was wandering. He found that, like many prisoners, whole days passed without a thought of his former life, or contemplation of his future. Only Ressource was real. Sometimes he forgot even to carve a daily notch in the tree beside his hut to mark the progress of his sojourn. The soles of his feet had grown sufficiently hardened for him to abandon shoes on the coral. He slept for longer and longer periods. His chief activity was to photograph himself at the daily routine – cooking, writing, manufacturing furniture. Mac was always a gifted cameraman, and he brought back some remarkable images from Ressource.

The thirtieth day, night of the full moon and highest tide, precipitated a bad fright. The sea lapped up to his camp, extinguishing the fire with an abrupt hiss. Mac bent furiously to work with a mattock, pushing up a frail rampart of sand which just sufficed to hold back the water until the ebb. Next day, he suffered another attack of nausea. His journal, in which each of the early entries ran to hundreds of words, now filled only a few lines, amid ‘the lassitude that keeps on overcoming me now’. By the thirty-fourth day he had become too weak to gather food, too ill to eat it. Afterwards, he decided that part of the problem was that he knew he needed only to survive for a fixed period. Had he been a genuine castaway, anticipating a possible eternity on the island, he would have forced himself to work much harder at finding sustenance. As it was, he sought merely to keep himself alive until the vital day when salvation would come. In this, he almost failed.

With ebbing strength and wit, he carved a sign which he hung outside his hut: ‘TO LET’. On the afternoon of the thirty-sixth day, he pursued a tottering path to the southern tip of the island. With difficulty, he hoisted his filthy shirt on a pole – the signal for rescue. He photographed himself in the pose, then found his head spinning. He slumped down in the shade of a palm. A sudden gust of wind blew down the pole. He was too weak to hold it up, and experienced a surge of fear that, in the absence of the agreed signal, his deliverers would stay away.

Somehow he stumbled to his camp, found a fishing line and wooden pegs, and returned to the point to tie up his pole. Then he staggered back to bed, and collapsed into unconsciousness. When he heard voices, he assumed that delirium had overtaken him. Opening his eyes, however, he beheld Marshall Dyer and a group of grinning ebony faces peering down at him, teeth gleaming in the dusk. ‘Delighted to see you,’ said Mac, with what he hoped was appropriate dignity. ‘How do I look?’ Dyer eyed him in silence for a moment, then responded: ‘My wife has sent a thermos of tea and some jam sandwiches. You look as if you need them.’

Mac could stumble ashore on Darros only by clinging to Dyer’s
shoulder. He sobbed when Dyer’s wife helped him into a bath and gently bathed his body. He had landed on Ressource weighing 160 pounds. Scales at the manager’s house showed that he had lost thirty-two pounds. His legs were covered in jungle ulcers, and he was displaying early symptoms of scurvy. In five weeks, he had reduced himself to something approaching the condition of a wartime prisoner of the Japanese.

Yet this ghastly predicament – for his condition in the last weeks became indeed ghastly – was entirely self-inflicted. In the Middle Ages, religious zealots employed acolytes to inflict upon them the sort of sufferings which he had contrived all on his own. Only Mac at his maddest could have devised, planned and executed a journalistic stunt which destroyed his health. This was flagellation advanced to an art form. Here was he, a respected fifty-year-old writer and broadcaster, earning a decent living in Britain, who had wantonly embarked upon an expedition which rendered him, quite literally, a stretcher case. He returned to our flat in Cromwell Road prostrate between two ambulance men.